Bourne Is Back

Matt Damon Returns to Jason Bourne, Proves He Can Still Throw a Punch in First Trailer

It’s been almost nine years since we’ve seen Matt Damon play Jason Bourne, but if you worried that buying zoos and awaiting rescue from Mars have made him soft, think again. In the first trailer for the upcoming Jason Bourne, released today, Damon turns the world and many of its inhabitants into his own personal punching bags to prove he’s still got it.

The last time we saw Damon in the action role that made him famous was in 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum. (He skipped out on 2012’s The Bourne Legacy, which starred Jeremy Renner instead, after saying he would only return to the franchise if director Paul Greengrass returned, too.) Greengrass, the director of The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, has in fact returned as well, and from the first trailer it looks like he and Damon’s reunion will be just as action-packed as ever.

Damon isn’t the only one returning to the series: Julia Stiles reprises her own recurring role of Nicolette “Nicky” Parsons, the movie’s main heroine and the Treadstone turncoat who betrayed the C.I.A.-backed black-ops program to help Bourne. “Remembering everything doesn’t mean you know everything,” she warns, just before we find out that the C.I.A. has been hit by a hack that “could be worse than Snowden.” Yikes. On the C.I.A. side, we have some new faces, Tommy Lee Jones and newly minted Oscar winner Alicia Vikander, poised to follow up on her breakthrough 2015 in a big way. And then, there are the usual Bourne motifs: fight scenes, chases, tense phone conversations, and a whole lot of chatter about memory. The movie punches its way into theaters July 29.